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Monday, August 17, 2015

Unifi for Revit 2016

The Revit Saver's August 2015 Add-in Review!

Note: This is intended to be a series of upcoming monthly reviews of tools, software packages, or a variety of other bits of information that I find handy in my professional workflow that others may find equally helpful in their own workflows!

Unifi by Inview Labs!

As mentioned in earlier blog posts, I had the pleasure of attending the Revit Technology Conference North America this year in Washington DC. It was an absolute blast and an overall enriching experience. One of the highlights of the experience was the exhibition hall! A lot of the tools that I've read about and researched were there exhibiting their software packages. One that truly stood out above the rest was Unifi! I had the pleasure of meeting Parley Burnett, Steve Germano, and Bryan Novotny! The three guys were AWESOME! Not only were they easy to talk to without feeling pressured to purchase something, but they truly were interested in getting to know me as an individual and what I did in the professional world and how their tool could be implemented. I explained my profession to them and the work flows that we have in our office and they showed me how I might be able to use their service in my office. They were at first a bit apprehensive at how we would be able to use this in a smaller office, but I had a better plan to use the service as a visual tool for our owner to communicate the systems he wanted integrated in the homes we design.
After spending just five minutes with the demonstration I was able to see the value for our firm, and how we could use the tool to not only manage our content by backing it up to a cloud, but to be able to help us for upgrading our files for each release with ease! After I got back from RTCNA 2015, I jumped on the trial and began to test it out! After uploading, I had all of our plumbing assemblies loaded into Unifi, and began snapping pictures of our groups. This integration was able to help our owner use the software without knowing how to use Revit. Essentially picking and placing the geometry based on specified locations without having to have difficulties explaining design intent. After uploading to the cloud, I am able to drag and drop my families into all my projects with ease, and I'm able to utilize them remotely from home. This functionality alone covers it. One might suggest opening up a dropbox and hosting their content in the cloud. Yeah, sure, you could do that, but can drop box overlay Revit and be a part of your Revit interface!? No, It can't. The value in this is that you are able to work remotely without copying and pasting server files back and forth between your office and home. Sure, you could connect remotely, and access your files that way but I assure you it isn't as fast as having the ability to access your content within a familiar interface.

"Harvey's Plumbing and Heating has integrated this process to be internally used on one machine with one Revit license. This allows the owner to specify the drawings he wants the groups to be placed on, and coordinates this data with the mechanical designer. The mechanical designers task is expedited, and laid out efficiently for him to focus on branch, waste and vent piping. This process has paid for Unifi and ensures secure content in the cloud in case of a network breach."*

*Note: The content is used internally for private use on one computer. This means that it is strictly used for management of our content, for security in case of a network breach, and communication within one license of Revit. This content is not shared, under any circumstances, with any other licenses of Revit or any other users. Period.